Emmanuel Jean....3 years ago

When my Brig, my 4th baby, was only 4 months old I started to have an overwhelming feeling that I needed to adopt . I had already decided that I wasn't going to go through another pregnancy. We had talked about adopting in a few years.....but I couldn't get it out of my head.....It had to be now!!! We started our paperwork!

8 amazing, faith strengthening months later.....
we got our first glimpse of a 4 day old baby that we knew was ours. The first, of many things keeping apart was our home study. The Social Worker doing it was in no hurry, he caused us a delay of several months.

This is one of the first pictures we got of him with his eyes open. He was already 6 months old.
In June, when he was 13 months old, my Parents and Sisters came with us to pick him up from his Haitian home.

This is our first encounter. I was hysterically bawling.... Emmanuel (his Haitian name) was all smiles!Mom was crying too.

It was such an incredible day! We went from such a high from our meeting, to a devastating low. The Orphanage director, Margarette, told us that the Us Government was requiring a DNA test of our baby and his mother. She was unable to sign her name, she had no ID, therefore there was a question about whether or not they were related. This was going to cause a delay of 6 weeks, or more.

We all cried, and 2 days later I had to leave my baby at the Orphanage. I was sure that my heart would break.

When we arrived home we found out that if we paid extra the DNA test would be expedited. Only 4 weeks had passed when we got the call. We had the DNA co. fax the results to the American embassy.....We could go and pick up our baby.

This time, only Jeff and I went to Haiti. We arrived at the orphanage, the weekend of July 4th, to find out that they hadn't recieved the DNA results. There was NOTHING we could do about it because the govt. offices were closed for the holiday weekend.

We left Haiti without our baby again. I wanted to stay there, but Jeff wouldn't let me. Instead I stayed in Florida.....alone, hoping that we could get the problem resolved quickly. I stayed there 5 days. Our paperwork had been sent to Mexico, by mistake. They weren't sure when they could get it to Haiti. Jeff made me come home...during a hurricane (for real).

July 22nd, we finally got the final OK to pick our baby up. They weren't going to make us come to Haiti again, Margarette was going to escort him to Florida (for a fee...of course!)
July 23, we were in the Miami airport.......waiting to see if our baby was going to come.....we weren't very optimistic.

And then....about 20 minutes before our flight was supposed to Utah was to leave.....they came through the gate. He was finally home! Finally ours!